Animation is hard work. The advent of computers in the hands of professionals have given cartoon characters more lifelike movements and mannerisms than we had ever seen before, but that's not the way they had it in the good old days, when each individual twitch on Mickey's eyelid had to be put in motion one frame at a time. Besides, animation is expensive, meaning that if you've completed this one sequence, and it looks good enough, you're going to see the characters behave in exactly the same way whenever the story demands that particular action, to the point that it looks jarringly obvious.

And so, when the story calls for our Toons to show off their stuff on the dance floor, you'll see that Michael Jackson had not a thing to worry about. Their movements are stiff, twitchy, and repetitive; often, no two characters will dance to the same beat, and none of them will pay any mind to the kind of music that's actually playing. If a series features more than one dance scene, for example, you'll notice that all the characters waltz the same way they tango. Finally, there are one or two distinct moves per character, which they will repeat over and over and over again. One really must wonder whether this is a dance at all; for all we know, the characters have just finished watching that one episode of Pokémon that gave a bunch of people epileptic fits.

Of course, this trope is a veritable gold mine of Narm Charm. No work that pays homage to the Peanuts animated series will fail to mention the piano-accompanied dance scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas, for instance. The Internet has really taken a liking to it, too, the "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" dancing banana avatars (and all variations thereof) and Caramelldansen videos being the two most noticeable memes.

Examples:

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Advertising

Kmart's "Gifting Out" ads for the 2013 Christmas season feature various people dancing maniacally and laughing hysterically at the fact that they saved so much on Christmas gifts at Kmart. Said dances are looped and looped and looped throughout the commercial, and the looping is so bad that you'd swear it was a form of Stylistic Suck. For instance, in this one, the lady's briefcase keeps respawning in her hand after she tosses it.

Anime & Manga

Princess Tutu is a gorgeous magical girl show about ballet that subverts and plays with its genre of metafairytale at every turn, buuut... on a limited budget. Sometimes you have intricate dances and beautiful animation, and then other times the ballet performances are shown in a series of panning stills.

You can distinguish between early-Miyazaki and late-Miyazaki by watching his heroine's hair when she's running. In his early work, the hair movement will be on a loop. In later work, when he had all the budget he'd ever need, every cel is original.

Films — Animation

Actually averted in the little-known animated film The Scarecrow about a dancing... well, a scarecrow. The movie isn't great but the dance sequences are crisp, smooth and imaginative. In the final dance near the end there's even a well-animated swing dance number.

My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks: The animation is overall excellent; if it does use a few loops, it's mostly for background characters, and too short to be noticeable. The exception is the distant shot of Trixie and the Illusions at the final concert, whose moves are a bit repetitive.

Also shows up for a bit towards the end of the Animated Music Video short "Friendship Through the Ages", where all seven girls are seen dancing together.

Not even Disney is immune to this. Animators on The Hunchback of Notre Dame turned to CGI to achieve the massive crowd scenes, with hundreds of moving figures visible. However, their actions are all drawn from a relatively limited pool of looping sequences, which are reused in multiple scenes and are hard to un-notice once you've noticed a few. Still an impressive achievement for the time though.

In the film Lovelines about a inter-high school Battle of the Bands, crowd reaction shots show the audience dancing or air-guitaring or otherwise reacting to the music but not in a way that at all reflects the beat or instrumentation of the music being played (such as doing air guitar during a drum solo).

Live-Action TV

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander does the Snoopy's looped dance from Charlie Brown (as he did every year at Xmas when they were kids) to prove to Willow that he is the real Xander. She stops him after a minute, but given that this is Xander, he probably would have kept looping.

GIF file animations can be set to run repeated loops. The best ones have the beginning and end synced.

Web Comics

The Weapon Brown comic, a Darker and Edgier parody of Peanuts, refers to the scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas with the neuromuscular syndrome simply called "The jigs". It is explained to be caused by overexposure to chemicals, and the symptom is violent physical seizures that that are reminiscent of the dance moves from the Christmas special. And the seizures will continue until the sufferer dies from it, usually by a broken spine.

On his website, Doctor Steel had a page where you could animate him doing loops of various dance moves (the monkey, the sprinkler, the cabbage patch, the robot, etc.) by pressing buttons underneath him.

Later Peanuts specials had even lower budgets, and went even further in recycling cels. For example, if Snoopy is riding a motorcycle, and needs to pull off to the side of the road, don't expect him to turn aside. Instead, the road will move out from under him.

Spoofed in a Robot Chicken sketch crossing Footloose with Peanuts, where Kevin Bacon's character remarks on the terrible dancing. He singles out the kid in the blue shirt, who seems to be doing some kind of zombie walk; the kid responds "I couldn't think of a dance! I panicked!"

Code Lyoko is famous for its excessive use of Stock Footage(not that its fans mind, really). It also has a couple of scenes featuring repetitive dance moves; once in Odd's music video, featuring two girls doing the Endless Loop in the background (along with a song that features no more than five different words) and again at the party during Aelita's first stint as a DJ, wherein Yumi's mad dance skills consist entirely of shuffling slightly from side to side.

CGI doesn't mean the end of the Endless Loop — witness the Hot Dog Dance at the end of every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. Careless use of a certain helmet, invented in a phase of genius-hating, will cause the wearer to intentionally break into an endless loop of dancing, while proclaiming the joys of being "loopy".

Done at the end of the Futurama episode "Mars University" to the song "Shout!".

Done on The Simpsons, particularly the episodes done before the show's animation switched to digital ink and paint (where looped and Off Model animation was common). Two notable examples:

"Radioactive Man" (season seven): The go-go girls dancing at the end of a fight scene from the campy 1970s Radioactive Man.

"Boy Scoutz 'n The Hood" (season five): The Imagine Spot of Homer dancing with lollipops and ice cream cones while singing "Sugar Sugar" (until they melt because the batteries to the Walkman Homer had note which belonged to one of Flanders' kids died).

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